Mile of Music ready to roll (Newsmakers Q&A)

Aug. 7, 2013

All of Dave Willems’ work to get Mile of Music started will begin to bear fruit.

The new music festival, which will bring more than 100 bands to downtown Appleton, will kick off today and run through Sunday.

Willems, a familiar name in Fox Cities marketing and non-profit circles, joined forces with singer Cory Chisel to put on Mile of Music. They hope it’ll grow into a showcase for great music and mark Appleton as a place to come to hear it.

Wednesday, Willems talked about the festival on Newsmakers, Post-Crescent Media’s online issues show. Here’s an edited transcript of the interview:

We heard late last week that Norah Jones might turn up at one of the shows. What’s the latest on that?

We’re excited about the possibility that she’ll be here. We have an inkling that Friday night would be a particularly special evening, hopefully. But I’m also hearing that possibly Saturday night, there might be an opportunity there, too. I know that Cory’s planning to join Rodney Crowell on Saturday night and maybe the whole group might come on Saturday night, as well.

While most of the shows are free, a few are ticketed. How are ticket sales going?

Ticket sales are interesting. We always said it’s the first year and we’ll see how it goes. We tried to do something a little different from most festivals. We tried to keep it to one VIP ticket and tried to keep that cost down. We tried to raise half the money through community donations, which I think we’ve done. So it’s really a community festival vs. being a kind of straight-line business festival. That’s worked pretty well but it’s taken more work to get it done that way, more recruitment of sponsorships.

Sales-wise, the headline shows have done well. The sponsorships have done well. The feature shows in the middle, those $15 feature shows, I think people have had a little bit of a tricky time getting their arms around that. They’re bands that are really, really good. They’re kind of like the Cory Chisels of other parts of the country coming here, but people don’t know them. So they’ve had to do a little homework. They’ve had to poke around. That’s kind of the nature of these festivals, so I think it’s one of those areas that’s going to take some time to evolve.

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With so many bands coming here, how did you handle the booking for those and deciding which bands to book?

It was an interesting process, especially trying to do it in 3½ months. Kind of a neat dynamic was that we entered the picture after all the festivals were announced for the year. All of a sudden, here comes Mile of Music in May and we kind of hit a little bit of a radar there because people were saying, “Where did this thing come from?” It made it a challenge, of course, but fortunately, we had a very good artist recruitment team made up of a number of local folks.

We’ve heard a lot about Mile of Music here in the Fox Cities. How have you marketed it outside the Fox Cities?

We haven’t done a huge effort outside the Fox Cities because we know this is something in general the community and the area is waiting for and we wanted to see what that looked like the first year. The plan is to evolve that. We have the state Department of Tourism looking at us for next year. And, of course, the Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau we’ve been talking about next year. We started talking to folks in February and March and announced it in May so we were already into the budget year for most organizations that would like to help us out. But we felt like we wanted to put our stake in the ground, rather than waiting until 2014. That just seemed like too far away, especially if it was August 2014.

What advice would you give to people you are interested in coming but aren’t quite sure how to approach it?

There are a lot of people planning to enjoy the free shows, so my best advice would be to be patient, to just kind of do some tire-kicking, to poke around. I have a feeling that some of the smaller venues are going to be hard to get into and, if that’s not the case, that’s OK, too. Come down and realize that the streets are open — this is a walkability fest down the sidewalks — and try to find a venue that you can get into and enjoy the music and, hopefully, spend a little money, too.